The Devil’s Backbone

This eerie tale about ghosts haunting an orphanage could have come off like an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? But with director Guillermo del Toro’s dark vision, it becomes a fairy tale for adults much in the vein of his later film Pan’s Labyrinth. Set during the Spanish Civil War, the movie focuses on Carlos, a recently orphaned boy who learns about the evils of the world by dealing with bullies and greedy thieves. Ghosts help him along on his journey, proving that just because you’ve stuck around after you died doesn’t mean that you are automatically the enemy.